All human life is a gift from our Creator that is sacred, unique, and worthy of protection. On National Sanctity of Human Life Day, our country recognizes that each person, including every person waiting to be born, has a special place and purpose in this world. We also underscore our dedication to heeding this message of conscience by speaking up for the weak and voiceless among us.

Every person waiting to be born? Really? Set aside the inherent contradiction in the notion of “persons unborn” (unborn life, maybe, or even unborn humans, but “persons”?). I want to know more about these persons queued up for an eventual birth, their purpose in non-life, and their struggles with the discrimination they suffer at the hands of those for whom birth has apparently led to such arrogant disregard. Can we even be sure that they’re Republican?

Kate Harding, writing in Salon, asks jokingly whether the first draft might even have included recognition of “every twinkle in every potential daddy’s eye” and notes:

Not considered as worthy of mention as zygotes in a proclamation on the Sanctity of Human Life: civilian and military casualties of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, victims of Hurricane Katrina, victims of torture by the U.S. military, hundreds of dead Palestinians, or Americans executed under the death penalty, to name just a few.

At Atheist Revolution, vjack similarly writes of Bush’s hypocrisy in seemingly favoring the unborn over the actually born.

You could have pushed to outlaw abortion, but you didn’t. Don’t get me wrong – I’m actually glad you didn’t. But if you really believed all this nonsense about unborn children being persons which are somehow more deserving of protection than those of us who have been born, I would have thought you might have put more effort into completely abolishing reproductive freedom instead of just blustering about it so much.